The Trial of Elizabeth Cree (10 page)

S
EPTEMBER
18, 1880: Lizzie has begged me to take her to the Canterbury, where Dan Leno and Herbert Campbell are appearing together, but I am tired of their sad exploits upon the stage. I see now, from the
Daily News
, that I have become known as the Limehouse Golem. What fools these people are.

A
nd so Solomon Weil had been found, mutilated, among his books. The brutal murder of the Jewish scholar, only six days after that of the prostitute in the same area, provoked a frenzied interest among ordinary Londoners. It was almost as if they had been waiting impatiently for these murders to happen—as if the new conditions of the metropolis required some vivid identification, some flagrant confirmation of its status as the largest and darkest city of the world. This probably accounted for the eagerness with which the term “golem” was taken up and published; few people who used it could have been aware of its exact significance, but cabbalists believe that the very sound or letters of a word can themselves become signs of its spiritual meaning. So in the intonation of “golem” the public may have divined the horror of an artificial life and a form without a spirit—the cadence and inflection of the word echoing and mocking “soul.” It was an emblem for the city which surrounded them and the search for the Limehouse Golem became, curiously enough, a search for the secret of London itself.

One of Weil’s neighbors had remembered seeing a foreign-looking gentleman with a beard leaving the house in Scofield Street, although she could not be sure which night that had been. In fact as the members of the recently established Criminal Investigation Department pursued their inquiries, they noted down other sightings of the same bearded foreigner; he had been seen lingering among the crowds outside the Pantheon song-and-supper rooms along the Commercial Road, for example,
when it had also been noticed by one observant waiter that he had written something in a small pocket book. The police were also able to find a more immediate witness: a hansom-cab driver came forward to testify that he had driven a gentleman of similar appearance to Scofield Street a few nights before. He remembered it distinctly as the night of the last great fog, and he had picked up the fare by his usual stand in Great Russell Street. He was sure that the gentleman had come from the British Museum, because he had seen him in that area before; unfortunately, he had forgotten the presence of John Cree on that same night. Two police detectives from “H” Division visited the Superintendent of the Reading Room on the following morning, and from their description of the bearded foreigner the identity of Mr. Karl Marx was quickly established.

Marx himself had been confined to his house since the evening John Cree had seen him in the Reading Room of the British Museum; he had contracted a severe cold, which had no doubt been exacerbated by his evening with Solomon Weil and his long walk homeward. He had seen no newspapers and so was quite unaware of the death of his friend—until, that is, Chief Inspector Kildare and Detective Paul Bryden visited his house in Maitland Park Road on the morning of September the 18th. They were shown into his study on the first floor by one of Marx’s daughters, Eleanor, who at the time was also looking after her mother: Jenny Marx had been ill for some weeks, and would soon be diagnosed as suffering from cancer of the liver. The room which they entered was filled with books, scattered around as if the spirit had been drained from them and they had sunk exhausted to the floor; the atmosphere was heavy with the scent of cigar smoke and, for a moment, Bryden was reminded of the song cellars and Caves of Harmony which he had inspected when he first joined the Metropolitan Police Force. Karl
Marx was sitting at a small desk in the middle of his study; he was wearing a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles which he removed as the two policemen entered. He was not particularly perturbed by their visit; he had been used to official attention for the last thirty years, and he greeted them with his customary mixture of gravity and self-assurance. But he was, perhaps, a little puzzled: in recent years the Home Office had seemed to lose interest in him. He was, after all, now an elderly revolutionary.

He invited both men to sit on a leather sofa beneath the window and, walking up and down on the small avenue of carpet left between his books, he politely asked them their business. Kildare wondered where he had been on the evening of the 16th, and he replied that he had stayed in bed with a chest cold from which he was now recovering. His wife and two daughters would confirm his presence in the house that night but, excuse me, had there been some kind of event? When they informed him of the death of Solomon Weil he stared at them for a moment, put his hand up to his beard, and muttered something in German.

“So you knew him, sir?”

“Yes. I knew him. He was a great scholar.” He took his hand from his beard, and looked at them gravely. “It is an attack upon the Jew,” he said. “It is not an attack upon Solomon Weil.” It was obvious that the police officers did not wholly understand him. “If only you knew,” he continued, “how in this world men can become the symbols of ideas.” Then he remembered his manners, and asked them if they would care for tea; Eleanor was summoned once again and, after she had left the room, the policemen questioned Marx more closely about his association with Weil. “I am a Jew also, although perhaps you would not know it.” Kildare made no reply but he noticed that, although Marx was old, there was a defiance and even anger
within him which he barely managed to keep in check. “We spoke together of the old stories and legends. We discussed theology. We both lived in our books, you see.”

“But you have also been seen alone, sir, in the streets of Limehouse.”

“I love to walk. Yes, even at my age. When I walk, I can think. And there is something about those streets which excites contemplation. Shall I tell you a secret?” Still Kildare said nothing. “I am writing a poem. In my earlier years I did nothing but compose poetry and now, in a place such as Limehouse, I can recall all the anger and sorrow of my youth. That is why I walk there.” He hardly noticed Eleanor when she brought in the tea, and she left the room as quietly as she had entered. “But do you suspect me of being a murderer, as well? Do you think I have red hands?” The allusion was not lost upon them, since they had already examined the files on “Carl Marx” in the Metropolitan Police Office—they had particularly noticed Detective Officer Williamson’s Special Report, numbered 36228, written six years before, in which it was recommended that Mr. Marx should be denied naturalization on the grounds that he was “the notorious German agitator, the head of the International Society, and the advocate of Communistic principles.” He had also been investigated at the time when Irish revolutionaries had attacked Clerkenwell Prison and the Home Secretary, Lord Aberdare, had placed him under surveillance after the fall of the Paris Commune in 1871.

“All I see upon your hands,” Kildare replied, “is the ink that you use.”

“That is good. That is how it should be. Sometimes I believe that I am made of ink and paper. Tell me now, how was Solomon killed?” Kildare looked across at the door of the study, which Eleanor had left open, and Marx closed it very quietly. “Is there something …”

“The details are unpleasant, sir.”

“Tell me everything, if you would be so kind.” Marx listened intently as Kildare explained how the skull of Solomon Weil had been crushed with a blunt instrument, probably a mallet, and how the body had then been mutilated. He also described how various organs had been draped around the room, and how the penis had been found on the open page of Hartlib’s
Knowledge of Sacred Things
across the entry for “golem.” That would be the name he would read in the newspapers. “So now they call this murderer a golem, do they?” Marx was very angry, and for a few moments he allowed the full force of his nature to be revealed to the two detectives. “So they absolve themselves of their responsibilities, and declare that the Jew is killed by a Jewish monster! Make no mistake about it, gentlemen. It is the Jew who has been killed and mutilated, not Solomon Weil. It is the Jew who has been violated, and now they wash their own hands clean!”

“But a prostitute has also been foully mutilated, sir. She was not a Hebrew.”

“But do you see how this murderer strikes at the very symbols of the city? The Jew and the whore are the scapegoats in the desert of London, and they must be ritually butchered to appease some terrible god. Do you understand that?”

“So you think it is some kind of conspiracy, or secret society?”

Karl Marx waved away the question with his hand. “
Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretier
.”

“Sir?”

“I cannot interpret it for you in that sense, gentlemen. I am talking only of the real forces which have created these deaths. Murder is part of history, you see. It is not outside history. It is the symptom, not the cause, of a great disease. You know, in the prisons of England, more convicts die at the hands of their fellows than by the judicial process.”

“I don’t follow you there.”

“I mean that the streets of this city are a prison for those who walk in them.”

At that moment there was a gentle tap upon the door and Eleanor, staying outside, asked if the gentlemen would care for more tea. No, they were refreshed and required no more; so she came in to remove the tray. She had something of her mother’s poise and once indomitable energy but she had also inherited her father’s innate theatricality—to such an extent, in fact, that, like her sister, Jenny, she was intent upon a career on the stage. She had already taken lessons from Madame Clairmont in Berners Street, but, although she had always enjoyed the low comedy of the halls, in such a respectable family as her own a career as
comique
or
danseuse
was quite out of the question. So she had begun to pursue a more serious course and in fact, earlier that week, had been promised her first part in
Vera, or The Nihilist
by Oscar Wilde. Her role was to be that of Vera Sabouroff, the daughter of an innkeeper, and she was mentally rehearsing one of her lines—“They are hungry and wretched. Let me go to them”—when she came into her father’s study to remove the tray.

Her father was accustomed to her presence, and simply continued with his conversation. “The dramatists treat the streets as theater, but it is a theater of oppression and cruelty.”

“They are hungry and wretched. Let me go to them.”

“What was that, Lena?”

She had spoken out her line, without realizing she had done so. “Nothing, Father. I was thinking aloud,” she whispered as she left the room.

The two detectives were not disposed to stay much longer in the old man’s company; but they listened to him politely enough, as he strode up and down the avenue of carpet. “Do you know French, by any chance?” he asked them. “Do you know what I mean when I say that
la mort saisit le vif
?”

“Has it something to do with death, sir?”

“It could be so. It can be translated in any number of ways.” He went over to the window; from here, he could see a small park where children came to play. “It also has something to do with history, and the past.” He stared down at a small boy carrying a hoop. “And I suppose that Solomon Weil was the last of his line.” He turned to face the police detectives. “What will happen to his books? They cannot be dispersed. They must be secured.” They looked at him in surprise for asking such a question and now, at last, they rose to leave without answering him. They did not believe that they had found their murderer, although Marx’s alibi would have to be thoroughly investigated and, for the next few days, he would be followed whenever he left the house in Maitland Park Road.

He remained in his study after they had gone, and tried to recall the details of his last conversation with Solomon Weil. He took up a sheet of paper and, still standing, made brief notes on all that he could remember. There had been one incidental exchange which still remained with him. They had been discussing the beliefs of a sect of Jewish Gnostics who flourished in Cracow in the mid-eighteenth century; their central article of faith concerned a form of perpetual reincarnation in the lower world, through which the inhabitants of the earth were continually reborn in other places and in other circumstances. The malevolent spirits of the lower air could sometimes divide a departing soul into two or three “flames” or “flashes,” so that the elements of the same person might be distributed into more than one body of the newly born. The demons had one other power, granted to them by Jehovah who is the evil god of this world: certain remarkable men would be restored to earth in the full knowledge of their previous life and identity but, on pain of everlasting torture, they could never reveal that knowledge. If they managed to sustain another natural cycle of generation upon this earth,
then their spirit would finally be released. “Do you know that you are Isaiah,” Solomon Weil had asked Marx that night, “or perhaps you are Ezekiel?”

He went over to the window once more, and looked down at the children. Was his old friend even now waking up to another life on earth? Was he one of the chosen, who would know that he had once been Solomon Weil? Or had his soul already been released? But it was all nonsense.

He walked to his shelves, and took down
Dialogues of Three Templars on Political Economy
by Thomas De Quincey.

I
believe that in a past life I must have been a great actress. As soon as I walked upon the stage with Doris, even before the gas had been lit, I felt quite at my ease. Of course in those early days I was merely the prompter and play-copier, no higher in station than the general utility man or the callboy—I never thought to sing or dance, any more than the limelight man would dream of becoming a comic patterer. But, as I said, the stage was my element.

My first days were spent watching Dan Leno in rehearsal with Charlie “They Call Me Dizzy” Boyd, and my employment was to write down all the “trimmings” and “chaff” which occurred to them as they went through the script. I would hear Dan say, “That wouldn’t make a bad line, would it?” or, “Can you see your way to adding this little bit of business?” and I knew that I would have to write furiously in order to keep up with what he called his “spontaneizing.” He was still very young but he could already draw upon an infinite fund of pathos and comic sorrow: I often wondered where it came from, not finding it in myself, but I presume that there was some little piece of darkness in his past. He was always laughing, he was never still, and he had a way of saying the most ordinary things so that you never forgot them. We were passing the Tower of London one day, on our way back from the Effingham in Whitechapel, and he leaned out of the window to look at it. He kept on staring until we turned down the next street, and then he settled back in the carriage with a sigh. “Now that’s a building,” he said, “that
satisfies a long-felt want.” It was the way he said it, too, not like a cockney slangster but, as he used to put it, in a melodious melancholy manner of mirth.